OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Conditional Generative Modeling for Images, 3D Animations, and Video
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

This dissertation attempts to drive innovation in the field of generative modeling for computer vision, by exploring novel formulations of conditional generative models, and innovative applications in images, 3D animations, and video. Our research focuses on architectures that offer reversible transformations of noise and visual data, and the application of encoder-decoder architectures for generative tasks and 3D content manipulation. In all instances, we incorporate conditional information to enhance the synthesis of visual data, improving the efficiency of the generation process as well as the generated content. We introduce the use of Neural ODEs to model video dynamics using an encoder-decoder architecture, demonstrating their ability to predict future video frames despite being trained solely to reconstruct current frames. Next, we propose a conditional variant of continuous normalizing flows that enables higher-resolution image generation based on lower-resolution input, achieving comparable image quality while reducing parameters and training time. Our next contribution presents a pipeline that takes human images as input, automatically aligns a user-specified 3D character with the pose of the human, and facilitates pose editing based on partial inputs. Next, we derive the relevant mathematical details for denoising diffusion models that use non-isotropic Gaussian processes, and show comparable generation quality. Finally, we devise a novel denoising diffusion framework capable of solving all three video tasks of prediction, generation, and interpolation. We perform ablation studies, and show SOTA results on multiple datasets. Our contributions are published articles at peer-reviewed venues. Overall, our research aims to make a meaningful contribution to the pursuit of more efficient and flexible generative models, with the potential to shape the future of computer vision.
A Distributed Approach to Meteorological Predictions: Addressing Data Imbalance in Precipitation Prediction Models through Federated Learning and GANs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

The classification of weather data involves categorizing meteorological phenomena into classes, thereby facilitating nuanced analyses and precise predictions for various sectors such as agriculture, aviation, and disaster management. This involves utilizing machine learning models to analyze large, multidimensional weather datasets for patterns and trends. These datasets may include variables such as temperature, humidity, wind speed, and pressure, contributing to meteorological conditions. Furthermore, it's imperative that classification algorithms proficiently navigate challenges such as data imbalances, where certain weather events (e.g., storms or extreme temperatures) might be underrepresented. This empirical study explores data augmentation methods to address imbalanced classes in tabular weather data in centralized and federated settings. Employing data augmentation techniques such as the Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique or Generative Adversarial Networks can improve the model's accuracy in classifying rare but critical weather events. Moreover, with advancements in federated learning, machine learning models can be trained across decentralized databases, ensuring privacy and data integrity while mitigating the need for centralized data storage and processing. Thus, the classification of weather data stands as a critical bridge, linking raw meteorological data to actionable insights, enhancing our capacity to anticipate and prepare for diverse weather conditions.
Enhancing Zero-Shot Crypto Sentiment with Fine-tuned Language Model and Prompt Engineering
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Blockchain technology has revolutionized the financial landscape, with cryptocurrencies gaining widespread adoption for their decentralized and transparent nature. As the sentiment expressed on social media platforms can significantly influence cryptocurrency discussions and market movements, sentiment analysis has emerged as a crucial tool for understanding public opinion and predicting market trends. Motivated by the aim to enhance sentiment analysis accuracy in the cryptocurrency domain, this paper investigates fine-tuning techniques on large language models. This paper also investigates the efficacy of supervised fine-tuning and instruction-based fine-tuning on large language models for unseen tasks. Experimental results demonstrate a significant average zero-shot performance gain of 40% after fine-tuning, highlighting the potential of this technique in optimizing pre-trained language model efficiency. Additionally, the impact of instruction tuning on models of varying scales is examined, revealing that larger models benefit from instruction tuning, achieving the highest average accuracy score of 75.16%. In contrast, smaller-scale models may experience reduced generalization due to the complete utilization of model capacity. To gain deeper insight about how instruction works with these language models, this paper presents an experimental investigation into the response of an instruction-based model under different instruction tuning setups. The investigation demonstrates that the model achieves an average accuracy score of 72.38% for short and simple instructions. This performance significantly outperforms its accuracy under long and complex instructions by over 12%, thereby effectively highlighting the profound significance of instruction characteristics in maximizing model performance.
Anomaly Detection of Command Shell Sessions based on DistilBERT: Unsupervised and Supervised Approaches
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Anomaly detection in command shell sessions is a critical aspect of computer security. Recent advances in deep learning and natural language processing, particularly transformer-based models, have shown great promise for addressing complex security challenges. In this paper, we implement a comprehensive approach to detect anomalies in Unix shell sessions using a pretrained DistilBERT model, leveraging both unsupervised and supervised learning techniques to identify anomalous activity while minimizing data labeling. The unsupervised method captures the underlying structure and syntax of Unix shell commands, enabling the detection of session deviations from normal behavior. Experiments on a large-scale enterprise dataset collected from production systems demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in detecting anomalous behavior in Unix shell sessions. This work highlights the potential of leveraging recent advances in transformers to address important computer security challenges.
ManiCast: Collaborative Manipulation with Cost-Aware Human Forecasting
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Seamless human-robot manipulation in close proximity relies on accurate forecasts of human motion. While there has been significant progress in learning forecast models at scale, when applied to manipulation tasks, these models accrue high errors at critical transition points leading to degradation in downstream planning performance. Our key insight is that instead of predicting the most likely human motion, it is sufficient to produce forecasts that capture how future human motion would affect the cost of a robot's plan. We present ManiCast, a novel framework that learns cost-aware human forecasts and feeds them to a model predictive control planner to execute collaborative manipulation tasks. Our framework enables fluid, real-time interactions between a human and a 7-DoF robot arm across a number of real-world tasks such as reactive stirring, object handovers, and collaborative table setting. We evaluate both the motion forecasts and the end-to-end forecaster-planner system against a range of learned and heuristic baselines while additionally contributing new datasets. We release our code and datasets at https://portal-cornell.github.io/manicast/.
An Exploratory Study on Simulated Annealing for Feature Selection in Learning-to-Rank
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Learning-to-rank is an applied domain of supervised machine learning. As feature selection has been found to be effective for improving the accuracy of learning models in general, it is intriguing to investigate this process for learning-to-rank domain. In this study, we investigate the use of a popular meta-heuristic approach called simulated annealing for this task. Under the general framework of simulated annealing, we explore various neighborhood selection strategies and temperature cooling schemes. We further introduce a new hyper-parameter called the progress parameter that can effectively be used to traverse the search space. Our algorithms are evaluated on five publicly benchmark datasets of learning-to-rank. For a better validation, we also compare the simulated annealing-based feature selection algorithm with another effective meta-heuristic algorithm, namely local beam search. Extensive experimental results shows the efficacy of our proposed models.
VR PreM+ : An Immersive Pre-learning Branching Visualization System for Museum Tours
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

We present VR PreM+, an innovative VR system designed to enhance web exploration beyond traditional computer screens. Unlike static 2D displays, VR PreM+ leverages 3D environments to create an immersive pre-learning experience. Using keyword-based information retrieval allows users to manage and connect various content sources in a dynamic 3D space, improving communication and data comparison. We conducted preliminary and user studies that demonstrated efficient information retrieval, increased user engagement, and a greater sense of presence. These findings yielded three design guidelines for future VR information systems: display, interaction, and user-centric design. VR PreM+ bridges the gap between traditional web browsing and immersive VR, offering an interactive and comprehensive approach to information acquisition. It holds promise for research, education, and beyond.
An LLM can Fool Itself: A Prompt-Based Adversarial Attack
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

The wide-ranging applications of large language models (LLMs), especially in safety-critical domains, necessitate the proper evaluation of the LLM's adversarial robustness. This paper proposes an efficient tool to audit the LLM's adversarial robustness via a prompt-based adversarial attack (PromptAttack). PromptAttack converts adversarial textual attacks into an attack prompt that can cause the victim LLM to output the adversarial sample to fool itself. The attack prompt is composed of three important components: (1) original input (OI) including the original sample and its ground-truth label, (2) attack objective (AO) illustrating a task description of generating a new sample that can fool itself without changing the semantic meaning, and (3) attack guidance (AG) containing the perturbation instructions to guide the LLM on how to complete the task by perturbing the original sample at character, word, and sentence levels, respectively. Besides, we use a fidelity filter to ensure that PromptAttack maintains the original semantic meanings of the adversarial examples. Further, we enhance the attack power of PromptAttack by ensembling adversarial examples at different perturbation levels. Comprehensive empirical results using Llama2 and GPT-3.5 validate that PromptAttack consistently yields a much higher attack success rate compared to AdvGLUE and AdvGLUE++. Interesting findings include that a simple emoji can easily mislead GPT-3.5 to make wrong predictions.
Towards General Error Diagnosis via Behavioral Testing in Machine Translation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Behavioral testing offers a crucial means of diagnosing linguistic errors and assessing capabilities of NLP models. However, applying behavioral testing to machine translation (MT) systems is challenging as it generally requires human efforts to craft references for evaluating the translation quality of such systems on newly generated test cases. Existing works in behavioral testing of MT systems circumvent this by evaluating translation quality without references, but this restricts diagnosis to specific types of errors, such as incorrect translation of single numeric or currency words. In order to diagnose general errors, this paper proposes a new Bilingual Translation Pair Generation based Behavior Testing (BTPGBT) framework for conducting behavioral testing of MT systems. The core idea of BTPGBT is to employ a novel bilingual translation pair generation (BTPG) approach that automates the construction of high-quality test cases and their pseudoreferences. Experimental results on various MT systems demonstrate that BTPGBT could provide comprehensive and accurate behavioral testing results for general error diagnosis, which further leads to several insightful findings. Our code and data are available at https: //github.com/wujunjie1998/BTPGBT.
PSGText: Stroke-Guided Scene Text Editing with PSP Module
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Scene Text Editing (STE) aims to substitute text in an image with new desired text while preserving the background and styles of the original text. However, present techniques present a notable challenge in the generation of edited text images that exhibit a high degree of clarity and legibility. This challenge primarily stems from the inherent diversity found within various text types and the intricate textures of complex backgrounds. To address this challenge, this paper introduces a three-stage framework for transferring texts across text images. Initially, we introduce a text-swapping network that seamlessly substitutes the original text with the desired replacement. Subsequently, we incorporate a background inpainting network into our framework. This specialized network is designed to skillfully reconstruct background images, effectively addressing the voids left after the removal of the original text. This process meticulously preserves visual harmony and coherence in the background. Ultimately, the synthesis of outcomes from the text-swapping network and the background inpainting network is achieved through a fusion network, culminating in the creation of the meticulously edited final image. A demo video is included in the supplementary material.
AP Connection Method for Maximizing Throughput Considering User Moving and Degree of Interference Based on Potential Game
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2023
Year: 2023

For multi-transmission rate environments, access point (AP) connection methods have been proposed for maximizing system throughput, which is the throughput of an entire system, on the basis of the cooperative behavior of users. These methods derive optimal positions for the cooperative behavior of users, which means that new users move to improve the system throughput when connecting to an AP. However, the conventional method only considers the transmission rate of new users and does not consider existing users, even though it is necessary to consider the transmission rate of all users to improve system throughput. In addition, these method do not take into account the frequency of interference between users. In this paper, we propose an AP connection method which maximizes system throughput by considering the interference between users and the initial position of all users. In addition, our proposed method can improve system throughput by about 6% at most compared to conventional methods.
A Human-Robot Mutual Learning System with Affect-Grounded Language Acquisition and Differential Outcomes Training
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

This paper presents a novel human-robot interaction setup for robot and human learning of symbolic language for identifying robot homeostatic needs. The robot and human learn to use and respond to the same language symbols that convey homeostatic needs and the stimuli that satisfy the homeostatic needs, respectively. We adopted a differential outcomes training (DOT) protocol whereby the robot provides feedback specific (differential) to its internal needs (e.g. `hunger') when satisfied by the correct stimulus (e.g. cookie). We found evidence that DOT can enhance the human's learning efficiency, which in turn enables more efficient robot language acquisition. The robot used in the study has a vocabulary similar to that of a human infant in the linguistic ``babbling'' phase. The robot software architecture is built upon a model for affect-grounded language acquisition where the robot associates vocabulary with internal needs (hunger, thirst, curiosity) through interactions with the human. The paper presents the results of an initial pilot study conducted with the interactive setup, which reveal that the robot's language acquisition achieves higher convergence rate in the DOT condition compared to the non-DOT control condition. Additionally, participants reported positive affective experiences, feeling of being in control, and an empathetic connection with the robot. This mutual learning (teacher-student learning) approach offers a potential contribution of facilitating cognitive interventions with DOT (e.g. for people with dementia) through increased therapy adherence as a result of engaging humans more in training tasks by taking an active teaching-learning role. The homeostatic motivational grounding of the robot's language acquisition has potential to contribute to more ecologically valid and social (collaborative/nurturing) interactions with robots.
Music Augmentation and Denoising For Peak-Based Audio Fingerprinting
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2023
Year: 2023

Audio fingerprinting is a well-established solution for song identification from short recording excerpts. Popular methods rely on the extraction of sparse representations, generally spectral peaks, and have proven to be accurate, fast, and scalable to large collections. However, real-world applications of audio identification often happen in noisy environments, which can cause these systems to fail. In this work, we tackle this problem by introducing and releasing a new audio augmentation pipeline that adds noise to music snippets in a realistic way, by stochastically mimicking real-world scenarios. We then propose and release a deep learning model that removes noisy components from spectrograms in order to improve peak-based fingerprinting systems' accuracy. We show that the addition of our model improves the identification performance of commonly used audio fingerprinting systems, even under noisy conditions.
Definition-independent Formalization of Soundscapes: Towards a Formal Methodology
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2023
Year: 2023

Soundscapes have been studied by researchers from various disciplines, each with different perspectives, goals, approaches, and terminologies. Accordingly, depending on the field, the concept of a soundscape's components changes, consequently changing the basic definition. This results in complicating interdisciplinary communication and comparison of results. Especially when soundscape-unrelated research areas are involved. For this reason, we present a potential formalization that is independent of the underlying soundscape definition, with the goal of being able to capture the heterogeneous structure of the data as well as the different ideologies in one model. In an exemplary analysis of frequency correlation matrices for land use type detection as an alternative to features like MFCCs, we show a practical application of our presented formalization.
HSVRS: A Virtual Reality System of the Hide-and-Seek Game to Enhance Gaze Fixation Ability for Autistic Children
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

Numerous children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) exhibit abnormal eye gaze pattern in communication and social interaction. Due to the high cost of ASD interventions and a shortage of professional therapists, researchers have explored the use of virtual reality (VR) systems as a supplementary intervention for autistic children. This paper presents the design of a novel VR-based system called the Hide and Seek Virtual Reality System (HSVRS). The HSVRS allows children with ASD to enhance their ocular gaze abilities while engaging in a hide-and-seek game with a virtual avatar. By employing face and voice manipulation technology, the HSVRS provides the option to customize the appearance and voice of the avatar, making it resemble someone familiar to the child, such as their parents. We conducted a pilot study at the Third Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University, China, to evaluate the feasibility of HSVRS as an auxiliary intervention for children with autism (N=24). Through the analysis of subjective questionnaires completed by the participants' parents and objective eye gaze data, we observed that children in the VR-assisted intervention group demonstrated better performance compared to those in the control group. Furthermore, our findings indicate that the utilization of face and voice manipulation techniques to personalize avatars in hide-and-seek games can enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of the system.
Exploring the Potential of Flexible 8-bit Format: Design and Algorithm
Venue: arXiv cs.PF 2023
Year: 2023

Neural network quantization is widely used to reduce model inference complexity in real-world deployments. However, traditional integer quantization suffers from accuracy degradation when adapting to various dynamic ranges. Recent research has focused on a new 8-bit format, FP8, with hardware support for both training and inference of neural networks but lacks guidance for hardware design. In this paper, we analyze the benefits of using FP8 quantization and provide a comprehensive comparison of FP8 with INT quantization. Then we propose a flexible mixed-precision quantization framework that supports various number systems, enabling optimal selection of the most appropriate quantization format for different neural network architectures. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed framework achieves competitive performance compared to full precision on various tasks, including image classification, object detection, segmentation, and natural language understanding. Our work furnishes critical insights into the tangible benefits and feasibility of employing FP8 quantization, paving the way for heightened neural network efficiency in tangible scenarios. Our code is available in the supplementary material.
A R4RS Compliant REPL in 7 KB
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2023
Year: 2023

The Ribbit system is a compact Scheme implementation running on the Ribbit Virtual Machine (RVM) that has been ported to a dozen host languages. It supports a simple Foreign Function Interface (FFI) allowing extensions to the RVM directly from the program's source code. We have extended the system to offer conformance to the R4RS standard while staying as compact as possible. This leads to a R4RS compliant REPL that fits in an 7 KB Linux executable. This paper explains the various issues encountered and our solutions to make, arguably, the smallest R4RS conformant Scheme implementation of all time.
ReLM: Leveraging Language Models for Enhanced Chemical Reaction Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Predicting chemical reactions, a fundamental challenge in chemistry, involves forecasting the resulting products from a given reaction process. Conventional techniques, notably those employing Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), are often limited by insufficient training data and their inability to utilize textual information, undermining their applicability in real-world applications. In this work, we propose ReLM, a novel framework that leverages the chemical knowledge encoded in language models (LMs) to assist GNNs, thereby enhancing the accuracy of real-world chemical reaction predictions. To further enhance the model's robustness and interpretability, we incorporate the confidence score strategy, enabling the LMs to self-assess the reliability of their predictions. Our experimental results demonstrate that ReLM improves the performance of state-of-the-art GNN-based methods across various chemical reaction datasets, especially in out-of-distribution settings. Codes are available at https://github.com/syr-cn/ReLM.